According to Politico, the McCain campaign is up in arms over “partisan” coverage of the presidential campaign. It’s nothing new for candidates to deride their media coverage as partisan or otherwise biased, and here’s what did it this time:

Davis made the request Sunday in a letter that is part of an aggressive effort by McCain to counter news coverage he considers critical…

[NBC News correspondent Andrea] Mitchell reported that some “Obama people” were suggesting “that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well prepared.”

A McCain aide said that is not the case: “Senator McCain was in a motorcade led by the United States Secret Service and held in a green room with no broadcast feed.”

Mitchell made the comment in the context of saying McCain did better, and that the Obama camp was defensive. In response to the campaign’s letter, she pointed out that journalists get criticism from both sides.

While the McCain camp is certainly making more of an issue out of this than there is, Mitchell certainly didn’t seem to be slamming McCain, it is worth our time to take a look at the kind of coverage McCain is receiving. At Riehl World View, the right’s view of the media in this campaign is summed up thusly:

Pity the dumbest of the lot here seems to be the media that either goes along with this garbage out of passion, or lacks the intelligence to grasp what’s going on and point it out.

I agree that much of the media might be playing dumb. I simply disagree that this is where it’s happening. That leads us to Frank Rich, and his column today in the New York Times, which outlines McCain’s coverage quite well:

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” — as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”

Rich also makes a very interesting point about the recent polling stating that voters have “heard too much” about Obama lately.  In contrast to Obama, 40% of Americans feel they’ve “heard too little” about McCain.  So what does present polling data represent?  An electorate saturated with Obama news, certainly not  unexpected given the historic nature of his candidacy and the protracted primary battle, and still somewhat unengaged with McCain.  What does that mean for the McCain campaign?  Bad news.  In a climate heavily favoring Democratic candidates, as-yet undecided voters already have a certain distaste for the Republican party.  John McCain’s news vacuum hasn’t been unique to positive coverage, but has kept to a murmur the level of criticism of the Arizona Senator.   With conventions looming and the home stretch of the race approaching, the McCain campaign may well find itself awash with negative coverage in the coming weeks as media outlets attempt to close the coverage gap and voters become more engaged.  What do most Americans know about John McCain?  His maverick reputation from 2000, his war record, but not much else.  The rest, unfortunately for him, is likely to be bad news, and that doesn’t bode well for November.

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Much ink has been spilled about the political genius of George W. Bush and Karl Rove. What I am left wondering, with the Bush presidency receding behind us, is how that perception came into being. Carlos Watson summed up in 2004 the general perception of Bush’s political prowess:

Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or an independent, it is hard not to look at President Bush’s re-election victory [in 2004] and conclude that he is probably one of the three or four most talented politicians of the last half of a century…

Bush’s extraordinary political success is probably owed to at least five key things: (1) great political fundamentals, including an ability and willingness to raise large sums of money; (2) an ability to propose a clear, coherent and easily understandable policy agenda (e.g., “compassionate conservatism”); (3) an ability to attract, manage and retain a strong team of advisers (e.g., Rove, Ken Mehlman, Ed Gillespie, Karen Hughes, Matthew Dowd and others); (4) a willingness to go for the jugular — repeatedly and without remorse (e.g., the “flip-flopper” label, gay marriage issue, South Carolina primary in 2000); and perhaps most important (5) a willingness to take a risk repeatedly (e.g., targeting Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle for defeat, offering a Social Security overhaul plan proposal, relying and counting on an evangelical turnout plan).

There is a great deal more to politics than winning elections, although that is often how we measure success. In all aspects, however, I cannot help but view the Bush administration largely as a failure. How, then, did this come to pass? How did we go from Rove and Bush as the political masterminds of a Republican ascendancy to a probable Democratic blowout in 2008?

The problem lies in the fundamental assumptions upon which the Bush political apparatus operates. The idea of the perpetual campaign, the installation of campaign adviser Rove in the policy shop, the perpetual eye on the base, the politicization of the federal bureaucracy — these actions were the product of that supposed political genius, but served to not only stave off the stated goal of a “permanent majority” for the Republican Party, but all but guaranteed a Democratic return to power. Nonetheless, the perception was that the Republicans had engineered a near-perfect system. They combined spectacular get-out-the-vote efforts with pinpointed marketing and data analysis for phone banks, mailings, and advertising time, and were brimming with confidence that this plan would put Republicans in the voting booths in sufficient numbers to avert any disaster. In October of 2006, one month before the Republicans’ November disaster, Time had this to say:

The polls keep suggesting that Republicans could be in for a historic drubbing. And their usual advantage–competence on national security–is constantly being challenged by new revelations about bungling in Iraq. But top Republican officials maintain an eerie, Zen-like calm. They insist that the prospects for their congressional candidates in November’s midterms have never been as bad as advertised and are getting better by the day. Those are party operatives and political savants whose job it is to anticipate trouble. But much of the time they seem so placid, you wonder whether they know something.

They do. What they know is that just six days after George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, his political machine launched a sophisticated, expensive and largely unnoticed campaign aimed at maintaining G.O.P. majorities in the House and Senate…

Every Monday, überstrategist Karl Rove and Republican Party officials on Capitol Hill get spreadsheets tallying the numbers of voters registered, volunteers recruited, doors knocked on and phone numbers dialed for 40 House campaigns and a dozen Senate races. Over the next few weeks, the party will begin flying experienced paid and volunteer workers into states for the final push. The Senate Republicans’ campaign committee calls its agents special teams, led by marshals, all in the service of the partywide effort known as the 72-Hour Task Force because its working philosophy initially focused on the final three days before an election.

The 72-Hour Task Force exemplifies the problem of the Bush political machine — running a country is very difficult with one eye focused on the three days before an election. Rove, explains the Top of the Ticket blog at the LA Times, has “long been renowned among co-workers for mining details and all sorts of fascinating tidbits from material that others completely missed.” While Rove certainly does have an eye for details, he misses the big picture in the process. What could possibly go wrong when you run the federal government in such a manner as to maximize the turnout of the Republican base in election years? For one thing, bad policy. What the Bush administration’s political “geniuses” overlooked was the simple fact that most of the American people are not partisan attack dogs. Most voters in this country vote on the basis of whether or not they think the country is being run well. These voters do not define good policy and good results according to a party-line litmus test. This is the ultimate failing of the Bush administration — substituting catch-phrases for government. Is it genius, in a game of chess, to snatch the opposing Queen only to be checkmated on the next move? Pulling out a win is, naturally, a very important part of electoral politics, but it is not the most important part. The most important part of electoral politics is establishing a basis upon which to win the next ten elections. The Rove and Bush never figured that out, and they will face the consequences yet again come November.

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A report issued yesterday by the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General’s Office in Justice concluded that Justice officials have engaged in hiring practices that “violated federal law and department policy, and also constituted misconduct.” More and more information has come to light in regard to the hiring policies the past several years at the Justice Department, revealing more completely the highly politicized atmosphere there that has been nursed into fruition by the Bush administration.

The LA Times published a piece that brought one of the most ridiculous incidences of this misconduct to light: homophobia.

On Monday, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog hinted at perhaps the most sensational justification yet — perceived homosexuality.

In the second of a series of reports on the politically charged tenure of former Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, the department’s inspector general found that two former Justice aides used sexual orientation as a litmus test in deciding whom they would hire or fire.

The most interesting aspect of the report is not that Monica Goodling and other officials in Justice politicized the hiring process, which everyone pretty well knew about anyway. The most interesting aspects of the reports are what’s left out. To what degree did then-Attorney General Gonzales know what was happening? To what degree did the White House know what was happening? Either Gonzales knew what the hiring practices in Justice were becoming and either allowed or encouraged it, a possible crime, or he didn’t know what practices his department was using in filling important non-political vacancies (including Assistant U.S. Attorneys), which would constitute what should certainly be called criminal negligence.

Furthermore, it must be asked, given the political nature of the hiring process, whether any impact was manifest in the activities of the Department. Take, for example, the case of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. The LA Times offers a good example of one of the irregularities in Siegelman’s case:

After Siegelman became governor, a Rove protege, Bill Canary, helped lead the successful GOP effort to defeat him in 2002. Canary’s wife, Leura, is a Bush-appointed U.S. attorney in Montgomery whose office won Siegelman’s conviction.

Leura Canary started to supervise the case but recused herself after complaints from Siegelman’s lawyers.

…Republican activist, lawyer Dana Jill Simpson of Rainsville, Ala., filed a sworn statement saying that she was on a Republican campaign conference call in 2002 when she heard Bill Canary tell other campaign workers not to worry about Siegelman because Canary’s “girls” and “Karl” would make sure the Justice Department pursued the Democrat so he was not a political threat in the future.

Another interesting case is that of Georgia Thompson, who was apparently prosecuted in an effort to impact the governor’s race in Wisconsin.

Beyond political prosecutions, it needs to be determined what, if any, impact these hiring practices had on Justice Department investigations into, for example, discrimination cases. Justice has a long way to go to clean up this mess, and it may take until well after January for everything to come to light. It is my opinion that criminal prosecution is necessary, although Attorney General Mukasey seems unlikely to pursue that avenue. There are few things in government more appalling than the politicization of law enforcement, and radical change is necessary at Justice to get this sorted out. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has seemed a bit lax when it comes to self-criticism. I don’t have my hopes up.

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Sen. Ted Stevens (R) of Alaska has been indicted on seven felony counts.  The charges stem from a year-long investigation into his relationship with the businessman, Bill J. Allen, who renovated his home.  Apparently the Senator “failed to report “things of value” that he received in connection with his home in the ski resort city of Girdwood, about 40 miles south of Anchorage,” according to the New York Times, in the span between 1999 and 2007.  Mr. Allen pleaded guilty in 2007 to charges of making $243,000 in illegal payments (read: bribes) to a politician who happens to be Ben Stevens, a state senator and son of Ted Stevens. It would seem that the sins of our fathers are two-way streets.  Politico lays it out quite succinctly:

At the center of the scandal is VECO, an oil services firm that also did hundreds of thousands in renovations to Stevens’ home, then asked him for official Senate actions on their behalf.

This certainly does not bode well for Sen. Stevens. Anchorage mayor Mark Begich (D) has been running very close to Stevens throughout this race, and is sure to pick up a great deal of steam after this revelation.  The calls from Republicans for Sen. Stevens to resign have already begun:

This is one seat that should stay in Republican hands. It will not, however, if Ted Stevens decides to hang on.

For the longest time Ted Stevens has done all things for the good of Ted Stevens. Now is the time for him to fall on his sword and take one for the GOP team.

Ted Stevens must resign.

If Stevens decides to carry on through November, this seat will almost certainly go to Begich, adding to the number of improbable Democratic freshmen from red states who will likely be filling Stevens’ old offices come January.

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47 year old Randy Pausch has died, a victim of pancreatic cancer. He knew some time ago that his time was limited, something I discovered because my mother sent me his “final lecture,” which he’d begun giving after he discovered his prognosis, and he became quite famous for it.

What is there to say? Professor Pausch gave himself in his final days, with his final lecture, to that everlasting idea that we must leave something behind. Professor Pausch said that his lecture, his book, was for his children. If it helped others, so much the better.

We must all, sooner or later, face that great and inexplicable boundary that is death. How much of our lives shall we dedicate towards its understanding? That must surely be our greatest question, our greatest fear. What do we leave behind? When we leave this life, what difference will we have made? How will we be remembered? I am quite young, but already I have seen too much of death, seen too many of my peers taken by it, offer themselves up to it. We have delved so deep into the consciousness of the human mind, but no study can discern that which, fundamentally, drives all of us. How shall we live? How shall we die?

We must not fear death. It is of no use; no more substantial than shying from the rising of the sun. How much time, how many lives, have we dedicated to our pursuit of that which lies beyond? More than I dare count. It is an awful bliss, such contemplation. I am not faced with death. I might be, of course, confronted with it at any moment. A swerving car, a faulty aircraft engine, a crack in the railroad track, a nuclear disaster, some unhealthy machination in my arteries — who can know when death approaches? I turn to John Keats, a man who nevertheless knew much better than I ever will how to express himself. He was was two years older than I am now when he wrote the following. He would die two years later.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Keats knew he was prematurely doomed, just as Pausch did. I again defer to wiser men than myself, in this case to Orson Welles, who said the following, in the shadow of the cathedral at Chartres:

Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world and it’s without a signature. Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations. Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life… we’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.

What have we each to offer? What may we impart upon our fellows, that we may be remembered when we are gone? That is for each of us to determine. That is for each of us to create. I know well those who have left their mark upon me; some have gone already, some have time yet to build upon that legacy. Randy Pausch was one of those who left me something, though he did not know me. I hope that it will be some time before I am left another. As always in such times, in the end I turn to the Bard:

And, when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of Heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

My thoughts are with his wife and children, I hope that yours are as well.

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The story, conveyed to us in spoken word, poem, novel, television show, film, or any of the other myriad forms it may take, is at the very heart of what it is to be human. This brilliant usurpation of mere instinct provides us with the unique capacity to transcend, however briefly or transparently, the absolute singularity of the mind. This most fundamental of human interaction is, then, the arbiter of the most fundamental of human conflicts. In our struggles – derived from no less than other, older stories – the story necessarily becomes the object of our objections. But what stories ought we be allowed to tell? As long as there are authors there will be censors. As long as we are human there will be both. But at what cost does the story come? At what cost its censorship? Oceans of ink and blood have been spilled over our right to speak, but what of our right to hear, or worse yet, to listen? Who determines the stories we can tell and have told to us? Who should? Having now offered up this purgatory of hyperbole, let us now turn towards the more pragmatic concerns of censorship today – beginning with the lens of history – and perhaps find our way back to these more universal questions.

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